I altered a Burda princess seam dress with a round neckline to a gentle v-neck. Immediately after cutting I stay-stitched the neck edges. Before binding with self-fabric bias strips, I trimmed the neck edge to 1/4" (inside the stay stitching). Attached the bias, made the little pleat at the point of the vee, tried it on--yikes, all stretched out, especially on the right side of the vee.

Any suggestions for fixing this? The dress is otherwise looking good. I suppose I will need to remove the binding and put on a new sort of neckline, but I am worried that I trimmed away so much seam allowance that any new neck treatment will be too low cut. I was thinking of making a facing applied to the inside and the outside (kind of like on the Hot Patterns Sunshine top, though that's not a vee).

It helps if you have a dress form to put your dress on, but here's a possible save for you. First, I would have used light fusible interfacing on the neckline, double the sas width. Here's what to do. Use lots of pins, and pin the excess one tiny pinch at a time then sew the seamline to a stay tape. I do mean a lot of pins for this. Then steam shrink it. A v neck is bias and you have opposite, and differently behaving bias edges. They will stretch if you look at them. Stay stitching made it worse. Some fabrics are so unstable that just taking them off the table will stretch them out.

As Nancy said, you may be able to rescue this dress but it will take a bazillion pins. Here is an article from threads magazine from a few years ago with photos of what you need to do. This was done by an expert, probably the world's expert, on bias necklines: Charles Kleibacker working with bias.

A couple of thoughts. First try to steam it back into shape as best you can. If the cloth is still stretched out, reshape the neckline lower down. A scoop curve might be easier to construct than managing a V neck on fabric that has stretched and could again.

If the neckline becomes too low, I suggest some styling ideas. Wear your dress with a camisole that you'd be happy having the neckline peeking out. Wear a beautiful scarf and drape in nicely. I wish you the best with this.

------Always keep your words soft and sweet, just in case you have to eat them. Andy Rooney

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